Hello, new hatchling here

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DobieLover said:
Hello and welcome to BYC! :frow Glad you joined.
Not sure why having a full time job prevents you from having ducks. Lots of folks with full time jobs enjoy raising poultry.
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It's kind of a combination of things. I've been doing a lot of internet research. In many ways I wish this whole duckling phase would go away. The new Disney Ducktales was recommended to me and I really liked it and then I start checking out a few videos and got to the "I really want a cute little duck baby" part that I'm in now.

So right there, I'm ADD so I run hot and cold on interests. In well-maintained captivity ducks can live for 20 years or so. So, running "cold" on my new duck won't work for the duck.

With a dog or cat, you can give it to relatives or friends or an animal shelter to be adopted with the knowledge that "Fido" or "Mr. Whiskers" will be cared for as a pet. With a duck? Maybe a farm. With the knowledge that there's a decent chance that Quackers ends up at the dinner table and not as a guest.

I have a backyard with one slightly decayed wooden fence between us and our next door, in the suburbs, neighbor. The rest of the yard is completely open. And gets pesticide and lawn treatments. There's no pool, not even a wading pool.

And even with duck diapers, I can't be there to change them every, what? 2-4 hours? So that nixes an indoor duck. And the set-up with maintainance of an outdoor area for them seems difficult and expensive.

And the job, which is pretty much a 5-day a week 11 hour a day commitment with communting. So, 11 hours a day plus call it 8-9 hours of sleep is going to leave very little time for me to care for a couple of ducklings. And not just physically. If they've imprinted (and they would be), I'm the Mom-God. A few minutes with me out-of-sight or unavailable freaks them out. How traumatized would they be with multi-hour absences? I'm figuring very.

There's a couple of video that I plan to post but the gist of them is that I do not want to be the kind of "owner" in those videos.

An imprinted ducklings looks at its mother with absolute trust. If/when I get a(or some) ducklings, I want to damned well make certain that I'm worthy of it. Right now, I don't believe that I am.
 
johntfs said:
(1) Are you new to chickens / when did you first get chickens?

Not a chicken owner at all.

(2) How many chickens do you have right now?

Zero, unless you count the Rafferty's chicken salad I have in my fridge. I'm more into ducklings.

(3) What breeds do you have?

Again, no chickens, and I don't actually own any ducklings, either. I'm more self-educating than anything else.

(4) What are your favorite aspects of raising backyard chickens?

If there was a way to keep ducks/ducklings in my actual home without bringing misery to myself or them, I'd do that and avoid the backyard.


(5) What are some of your other hobbies? TV, video games, watching duckling videos.

(6) Tell us about your family, your other pets, your occupation, or anything else you'd like to share.

One reason I probably never will own ducklings/ducks is that I have a full-time job and "duck-sitters" are hard to come by.

(7) Bonus: How did you find BYC, how long have you known about BYC, and what made you finally join our awesome community?

Googling various stuff about ducklings, I noticed that this site came up a lot, so I finally joined.
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:frow
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